The new Muppets Christmas special is up on Hulu.com. While it’s not one of the best features the Muppets have done, the scene at airport security ranks up with some of their best sketches:– Fozzy Bear tells a stupid joke (“What brings toys to baby sharks?”), but it is against Federal law to tell bad jokes in airport security, so Fozzy gets jumped by half a dozen security guards. Meanwhile, Gonzo — ah, why spoil it for you, go watch it yourself.
Incident on Pope’s Island
Carol and I were driving along Route 6 back from the supermarket in Fairhaven. The swing bridge was closing to traffic just as we got to the Dunkin Donuts on Pope’s Island, so we stopped and sipped some decaf until the traffic started moving again.
Carol backed her car out of the parking place, and was just about to put it in gear when we heard a faint voice: “Wait! Wait!” A young woman was running towards us from a green pickup truck parked in front of Dunkin’s — I say she was running, but it looked like she had on high heels under her jeans, so she didn’t move very fast. Carol rolled down the driver’s side window.
“Hi, we were in Dunkin’s and they declined my credit card when we tried to buy coffee,” said the girl breathlessly. She had a low throaty voice, as if she smoked a lot. “And we’re out of gas, and…”
Carol stopped her, speaking in a matter-of-fact tone: “You don’t understand. We live in New Bedford and we get scammed all the time for money.”
“Oh, but I live in Fairhaven,” the girl said.
“Yeah, but that’s not the point,” said Carol. “We hear this kind of thing all the time here.”
“Oh,” said the girl. “I’m new to Fairhaven. I just moved in with my boyfriend,” she went on, “it’s my dad’s business credit card, and I don’t know why it got declined. We’re puttering along on fumes, and we have to get back to Fairhaven.”
“You’re not going to be able to buy gas here anyway,” Carol pointed out. “All the gas stations near here are closed now. The nearest gas stations are going to be back in Fairhaven.”
That stopped the girl for a moment. I bent down so I could see her face and said, “Do you have a Triple-A card? because they’ll come out with a gallon of gas for you.”
She looked at me and smiled crookedly. “No, I wanted to get one, but my boyfriend didn’t want one.”
“You’re not going to be able to buy gas here anyway,” Carol said again.
“I guess we could call my boyfriend’s mother,” the girl said.
“Good luck,” said Carol, rolling up her window.
We drove away. “It sounded like a scam, but I wonder,” she said.
We passed Fish Island Gas Station, which was closed and dark. “It sounded like a scam to me,” I said. “I’ll bet she saw us walking to the car, assumed I was driving, and thought she’d show a little cleavage and convince me to give her some money.” Which was a pretty cynical thing to say.
“She had on a lot of make-up,” said Carol, thinking out loud. “but her hair was a little stringy as if she hadn’t washed it today. Her looks were good enough that she didn’t need all the make-up.” We passed the exit to Route 18, and went up the S-curve into downtown New Bedford. “All the details she gave us made me think maybe it wasn’t a scam.”
“Maybe, but the con artists who come to the church always give lots of details,” I said. “Besides, even if she wasn’t trying to scam us, that’s not something serious enough to ask for money from strangers. They can call someone they know. They have to take some responsibility for their life.”
“But someday something could happen that’s serious enough that you do need to ask for help,” Carol said.
“That’s true,” I said. “Anyway, we treated her with respect.” There’s a good chance the girl was honest, but it sounded too much like the scams we hear day after day — Could you give me ten dollars for a bus ticket to Boston? We’re driving to ——— and ran out of gas, could you give us twenty dollars to buy gas to get out of New Bedford? — and then the same exact people come back a month later with the same exact story all over again.
The traffic light at the intersection of Route 6 and Pleasant Street was green for once, and we sailed through it and turned onto North Sixth, then left on William Street. By the time we passed City Hall, we were talking about something else.
Next generation
One of the high schools in this area requires all seniors to complete a senior project on a topic of their choice. The project includes a written research paper, an oral presentation, and 15 hours of work with a mentor. This year, one senior asked me to be his mentor for his senior project on world religions.
This particular high school senior is fun to work with — he has a flexible and curious intellect, is willing to push himself, and is open to new ideas. Tonight we determined that he takes an essentialist approach to religion while I take a functionalist approach, and then we talked about the phenomenological approach to studying religion. In the course of all this we started on some basic scholarly skills like learning how to underline in books, how to ask critical questions while reading, how to hold a different opinion than the author or one’s mentor, and how to look for the internal structure and unspoken assumptions of a piece of writing.
I realized that what I was really doing was introducing him to the intellectual tradition in which I was originally trained, an Americanized version of critical theory. I also realized that I’m taking on the role of one of my primary intellectual mentors, Lou Outlaw — even down to not worrying about whether the student agrees with me, and instead worrying that they understand and find a new perspective on the world.
All of which got me remembering my own mentor, and reflecting on how I’m passing on this tradition to another generation, in my own way. One result of this reflection was a quick Web search, which led me to this thoughtful video interview with Lou Outlaw. My favorite bit in the video [at about 11:30] is when Lou says: “This is ludicrous. What do you mean you don’t criticize socialism? Criticism is central to the management of social, political, democratic life. You gotta have criticism.”
Which pretty much sums up the intellectual tradition that I’m now trying to pass on to the next generation, even though I’m now doing theology instead of political philosophy.
More on shoes
Today the BBC reports: “An Iraqi official was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the journalist was being interrogated to determine whether anybody paid him to throw his shoes at President Bush.” Given the stated policies of the current U.S. administration, the word “interrogated” could mean what the rest of the world would call torture.
The BBC also reports that the man’s name is Muntadar al-Zaidi, and they give an English translation of what he shouted at Bush: “This is a farewell kiss, you dog… This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq.”
Special take-home quiz: Who is on the moral high ground here, George Bush or Muntadar al-Zaidi, and why? Ten bonus points for citing verses from both the Koran and the New Testament.
Update: Leona’s selling T-shirts (see comments).
“Bad times draws bigger crowds to churches”…
…to evangelical churches, that is. Mainline Protestants and Catholics don’t see as many newcomers when the economy gets bad — this according to the New York Slime, which not a trustworthy source when it comes to American religion.
Shoes?!?…
At 19:16 GMT (i.e., 2:16 p.m. EST, less than 3 hours ago), the BBC Web site reported that an Iraqi threw shoes at George W. Bush. Shoes? Yes, shoes….
An Iraqi journalist was wrestled to the floor by security guards after he called Mr Bush “a dog” and threw his footwear, just missing the president.
The soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture….
In the middle of the news conference with Mr Maliki, a reporter stood up and shouted “this is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog,” before hurtling his shoes at Mr Bush, narrowly missing him….
Correspondents called it a symbolic incident. Iraqis threw shoes and used them to beat Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad after his overthrow….
What a wildly improbable story, and what an interesting example of political theatre. I guess peace rallies on the Mall in Washington are just too Old School, so nowadays the really cool protesters throw shoes.
I shouldn’t be so flippant. That journalist is dead meat, and is probably having the crap beaten out of him even as I write this. Watch the video — security is going easy on him because there are cameras watching, but they are not being nice to him — wait until there aren’t any cameras trained on them.
A random memory
This took place back somewhere around 1984, when I was working as a yardman in a lumber yard.
One of the truck drivers — we’ll call him Skipper — was a young guy, maybe twenty or twenty-two, with sandy hair down to his shoulders and a friendly open face. Like all of us, he always wore a baseball cap, and like most of us younger guys he always wore shorts and a T-shirt in the summer; like me, he wore wire-rimmed aviator glasses of the type that were popular back then.
But he was a little louder and more cheerful than the rest of us, and he had a wicked west-of-Boston accent, and above all he partied much harder than anyone else who worked there. He was late for work more than once because he was hung over, or he slept through the alarm clock, or (so it was said) he was still drunk or stoned when he got up in the morning and couldn’t get it together enough even to drive to work.
Skipper managed to make it work for a couple of years; he wasn’t the best driver we had, but he was good enough. Then he started getting worse. One morning, Bob, the senior driver, came back from a delivery just before lunch. “Where’s Skipper?” he said. “I don’t see his truck.”
One of the other drivers said that Skipper wasn’t back yet.
Bob, a master at sounding disgusted, said, “Jesus, he just had to go up to Carlisle, and he left before I did.”
Pretty soon everyone, even the kid who came in to work after school, was aware that Skipper was screwing up. The other drivers were resentful because Skipper wasn’t pulling his weight. Georgia, the yard foreman, would make a point of checking his watch when he saw Skipper driving into the yard. It became obvious that the shipper and the vice-president were also keeping an eye on him. Skipper didn’t seem to care; he was the same happy-go-lucky, half-stoned, cheerful guy as usual. This went on for a few weeks: tension building around Skipper, while he seemed utterly unaware of it.
One day, late in the afternoon, several of us were standing around in the coffee shack, pretending to wait for customers but really waiting for five o’clock to come around. One of the drivers came out of the shipper’s office. “They caught Skipper.” “What? Whaddya mean, they caught him?” He told us what he had heard, a bare-bones account of what had happened: Skipper was driving one of the box trucks; the vice-president shadowed Skipper in a car, followed him to a jobsite, a place where there was no delivery scheduled; Skipper was selling drugs off the back of his truck.
That’s all we ever heard about it. Nobody had to say that they fired Skipper, we all knew that. But was he just selling marijuana, or was it something more serious? Were the cops called? Was he arrested? I never found out, and no one ever talked about it. Skipper never came back, and I never saw him again.
Another take on Harvey Milk
Blogger Tallturtle was living in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco when Harvey Milk was assassinated thirty years ago, and he’s written a short memoir of his impressions of the incident, from his perspective as an ordinary San Franciscan of that day.
Tallturtle has a couple of observations that I hadn’t heard before:– First, that Dan White, the guy who murdered Milk and George Moscone, was fairly clueless when it came to politics, and possibly even too honest in a peculiar sense of the word:
This next part is merely my speculation. White was a political amateur. He didn’t understand how politics was played in San Francisco. He didn’t realize that as a conservative Supervisor, he was valuable to the commercial and financial elites of the city. He didn’t know there were many perfectly legal ways that rich people could reward their friends. Heck, he may not have known that these people considered him his friend….
And second, that San Franscisco of that day was not a coherent city, but rather a collection of many smaller communities that didn’t really communicate with one another. This last point leads to the moral of the story for Tallturtle — but rather than spoil the moral for you here, you should just go and read the post yourself.
[untitled]
Low gray clouds come and
go. The wind shifts from east to
southwest then to west.
The turn of seasons
seems to be stalled. It’s fall, then
it’s winter, then fall.
Midafternoon, just
before sunset, the clouds broke,
and turned orange pink,
a solstice sunset
in shirtsleeve weather with a
winter’s cold west wind.